Posted
by
BeauHDon Friday March 17, 2017 @02:00AM
from the speed-racer dept.

schwit1 writes: Astronomers have spotted a star whizzing around a vast black hole at about 2.5 times the distance between Earth and the Moon, and it takes only half an hour to complete one orbit. To put that into perspective, it takes roughly 28 days for our Moon to do a single lap around our relatively tiny planet at speeds of 3,683 km(2,288 miles) per hour. Using data from an array of deep space telescopes, a team of astronomers have measured the X-rays pouring from a binary star system called 47 Tuc X9, which sits in a cluster of stars about 14,800 light-years away. The pair of stars aren't new to astronomers -- they were identified as a binary system way back in 1989 -- but it's now finally becoming clear what's actually going on here. When a white dwarf pulls material from another star, the system is described as a cataclysmic variable star. But back in 2015, one of the objects was found to be a black hole, throwing that hypothesis into serious doubt. Data from Chandra has confirmed large amounts of oxygen in the pair's neighborhood, which is commonly associated with white dwarf stars. But instead of a white dwarf ripping apart another star, it now seems to be a black hole stripping the gases from a white dwarf. The real exciting news, however, is regular changes in the X-rays' intensity suggest this white dwarf takes just 28 minutes to complete an orbit, making it the current champion of cataclysmic dirty dancers. To put it in perspective, the distance between the two objects in X9 is about 1 million kilometers (about 600,000 miles), or about 2.5 times the distance from here to the Moon. Crunching the numbers, that's a journey of roughly 6.3 million kilometers (about 4 million miles) in half an hour, giving us a speed of 12,600,000 km/hr (8,000,000 miles/hr) - about 1 percent of the speed of light.

You might be right. This might be a lucky find though in a larger project that does result in tangible benefits to society. And then I’m not against spending some more time to research it.

Your broader question might be about basic research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. Basic research might not result in direct benefits, but a better understanding of natural phenoma can actually result in immense benefits.

In this case, for example, this might be the first object that we discovered that actually travels at speeds (in orders of magnitude) close to the speed of light. This could, for example, in the long run improve our understanding of relativity, properties of light and electromagnetism, etc.

If you realise how close some of our everyday technologies such as microprocessors, WiFi, etc. actually are operating close to the absolutes borders of physics, then you’ll understand that things we learn from basic research is the only way left to improve those technologies.

So, this finding *might* lead to some new understanding that *might* lead to new technologies that *might* lead to incredible new benefits to society. The only problem is, you don’t know in advance which research is the one with the big benefits. Spread your bets.

You have to find a good mix in investing in the future and solving everyday problems *now*. And it’s very hard to make any argument about investing in the future to somebody who’s hurting today. You’re never going to win that debate, rationally or emotionally.

I read somewhere (http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/jfk-and-the-moon-180947824/) that Kennedy, before deciding on using project Apollo as a technological showcase for America, actually considered a large-scale desalination project to help Third World nations.

What if Kennedy had chosen the latter option? How would the world have evolved since then? An abundance of water and food in Africa but no internet and supercomputer in everybody’s pocket? Or would the desalination have contributed little and computers evolved just the same? Nobody's arguing about his choices back then because we're all happy his mission succeeded.

In the end, again, it’s about finding the right balance in investing in every day problem solving *and* investing in things that help us forward in the future.

What if Kennedy had chosen the latter option? How would the world have evolved since then? An abundance of water and food in Africa but no internet and supercomputer in everybody’s pocket?

That's not very likely. The Internet came from an ARPA project that was unrelated to the space program. The space program contributed a little to the development of computers, but it was just a single customer for computers - the DoE was a much larger one, even just counting US government spending. The main outcomes of the space program that are relevant for smartphone / Internet development were in satellite technology, in terms of GPS and communication satellites and could still have been developed wit

I recently saw an American claim that "the moon landing program did everything with a commodore 64 and hasn't contributed anything since". Which, if it was true, would mean they'd unlocked the secrets of time-travel considering that the Appollo program ended in 1972 and the first C64 wasn't actually built until 1980 - not to mention the Commodore64 was made-in-Britain: hardly an American contribution, when it was first unveiled American companies were flabbergasted at what it offered for 500-dollars, a pric

If that's among their most noteworthy achievements, it doesn't say much. Clusters were a pretty obvious development: they're basically an approximation of existing supercomputer designs using commodity hardware, and come with all of the limitations that you'd expect. If NASA hadn't invented them, someone else would have done, just as multiple people have replicated the high-availability features of mainframes on commodity hardware with VMs.

No actually - when they did it that was not where anybody else was heading. The supercomputing world was still ruled by Seymore Cray who was convinced that clusters could never compete with massive-chip systems in either cost or power.And he still ruled the market.

NASA however, could not afford his computers anymore - and you know what they say about necessity and invention. So while others had theorised clusters before - nobody had tried to solve the issues of how to practically BUILD a super-computing cluster because the only game in the supercomputing town wanted none of it. NASA made them work - with beowulf - and it's noteworthy for it's impact (which was enhanced because NASA open-sourced the technology). Within two years the same idea was being used for redundancy and high-availability designs (expanding on the original 'build a cheap supercomputer' concept.Every cluster in every data center in the world today is a direct descendent of NASA's design. It's a cornerstone of 21st century computing - and in the research side it's how EVERY super-computer is built now. But NASA pioneered it - when every expert thought it couldn't be done.

Every cluster in every data center in the world today is a direct descendent of NASA's design

There are very few clusters in datacentres. Most distributed compute jobs in datacentres use things like MapReduce or similar, which (unlike Beowulf) are specifically designed around high-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects. There are clusters in supercomputing centres. They overwhelmingly use MPI, which predates NASA's Beowulf system by three years and was an integral part. MPI was developed with NSF and ARPA funding. NASA built a famous commodity system using it, but they weren't the first, nor wer

I've worked on a number of systems that people referred to as 'beowulf clusters,' but not a single one was actually running the Beowulf software.

I see... so that's not a car, it's an automobile!!

I think you pedanted yourself right out of making any sense. What you describe are indeed Beowulf clusters. [wikipedia.org]

No particular piece of software defines a cluster as a Beowulf. Beowulf clusters normally run a Unix-like operating system, such as BSD, Linux, or Solaris, normally built from free and open source software. Commonly used parallel processing libraries include Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM). Both of these permit the

He is claiming that Beowulf clusters are one of the biggest contributions to computer science by NASA. Beowulf clusters are commodity hardware combined with open source software that predates NASA's involvement. NASA's contribution was to assemble the bits and give it a name. They weren't the first organisation to build a cluster using that software. There was almost nothing new in the software, network topology, or hardware in their design, yet this is what he's claiming as evidence of NASA's great con

Sure, we can do more. However, cutting basic research out of the budget isn't going to free up anywhere near the needed money. For that, we'd need to cut into a reasonably large part of the budget, or raise taxes, or go deeper into debt.

Also, lots of the people hurting aren't going to be helped by throwing money at them. There has been a structural shift in the economy since the 1950s, and a lot of blue-collar jobs are simply not coming back. The US still makes a very large amount of stuff, but with

>Also, lots of the people hurting aren't going to be helped by throwing money at them.

Which is why I learn about my medical situation, which I have to do on my own, because the people who contribute to my care can't provide any useful in's, relying on "Do you have any questions?" No, but I have keywords like vitamin D deficiency, near diabetic, etc. Well at least they have recently switched over to a computer system that allows me to access the lab tests they've run on my blood, but the system is nowh

ask this question "Why are tax dollars funding useless research like this when the money could fund our military or cutting taxes on our businesses." Seems this time Slashdot is the location of this black hole.

Even solid-state physics seemed esoteric at first. Why try to find out how electrons move between atoms in crystals that are not very good conductors, but quite bad isolators as well? And suddenly: transistors!

Questioning the reason behind research is partly envy (why don't I get this cool equipment to play with?), partly missing imagination (why can't I think of anything this might be useful for?) and partly missing scientific education (why do I take everything I use today as a given without ever wondering how they work?).

Well to the guy in Kenia running after a chicken at 1 billionth of the speed of light, it matters whether the earth is flat, since it would get progressively more difficult if the earth really was shaped like a soup bowl.

Fast forward 1000 years. Your flying car is running on essentially free energy thanks to its "gravity engine" (tm) which draws upon Physics so extreme, that to become aware them, you would have had to setup something as massive as a white dwarf orbiting a black hole, and study it for 30 years, before being able to reproduce this phenomenon in laboratory conditions, let alone miniaturize it.

No-one knows where the next breakthrough will come from, so we let researchers study things they personally really want to learn, in the knowledge that some of them will discover things that are valuable.

The basic theory and implementation used in all wifi networks came about because of basic radio astronomy research - the very thing you're criticising - done by radio astronomers at CSIRO in Australia.

The world wide web came about as a side effect of basic physics research at CERN. All the money ever s

With the tidal forces this star has to be shaped like a big bent line whipping through space. I imagine pretty massive to keep a elongated core at critical mass as it whips around this star. It might be able to turn even a red giant into a super long white dwarf by stretching out the layers and surface area.

If it's a white dwarf (WD), it's going to have an internal strength (stiffness) somewhere well above that of steel, but more importantly, very strong forces pulling it's material back together.

My non-calculated estimate on the WD's shape is that it would be a prolate ellipsoid of rotation, with the long axis pointing towards the primary. Not necessarily directly at the primary - there might be some displacement due to the residual rotational angular momentum of the WD.

I realise you're trying to be pedantic, but you're not trying hard enough. When we talk about Black holes, we mean the phenomena. As such, some black holes can be vast, since we consider the "hole" to be defined by its Schwarzschild radius. Now, if you're talking about the singularity at the centre of a black hole, that would be another matter.

They're at least 1 cubic plank-length. Not to mention the notion of a true singularity is probably wrong. There's a lot of magic hand-waving to think of a blackhole as a true singularity. Some how the blackhole can grow, yet nothing can fall past the event horizon in any frame of reference, and all of the information is at the "center"? What? How does the information get to the center if by definition it can not?

The more recent idea that a blackhole is just the highest density of information with the inf

You're right. The tidal force must be huge. Especially since the orbiting star is losing mass to the black hole it cannot be in a perfectly circular orbit but must be somewhat eccentric. And those massive changes in gravitational forces it's subjected to are cycling over the space of just a few minutes!
To add to the question about how close the star is to the Roche limit, does anybody know the mass of the black hole it's orbiting? How close is it to the black hole's event horizon? It would be very cool if

Everybody knows that only photons can reach the speed of light in vacuum.What happens with a solid object if we are starting to accelerate it?To what speed can it accelerate without losing its physical parameters (by ionization, atomic reactions etc)?

But the closer it comes to the speed of light the heavier it gets, it gains mass. That means, to accelerate it further, you need more power, but mostly you will again: just increase its mass and not its speed. Hence it can not reach the speed of light.

However in labs we accelerate electrons or protons to something like 99.9% of c.

Mass doesn't lose its "physical parameters"e, true. But a physical object does! I have a spaceship. It is accelerating by some means. My question is: at what speed approximately it becomes a "set of protons and electrons" instead of its normal shape? To what speed it can accelerate without losing its shape?

My question is: at what speed approximately it becomes a "set of protons and electrons" instead of its normal shape? At none?To what speed it can accelerate without losing its shape? As close to c as you want, why do you think your ship would lose its shape?

I must say that was my exact reaction to reading it, whoever wrote that really needs to get some perspective

“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.

To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."Douglas Adams - The Restaurant at the end of the Universe

I must say that was my exact reaction to reading it, whoever wrote that really needs to get some perspective, perhaps a nice car analogy.

Perspective?

We still shove hundreds of horses under a car hood to measure it's power, and we love to get hopes up when discussing habitable planets that are "only" a few light years away, while describing an object traveling 8 million miles per hour using a metric invented in the 18th century.

A better way to put that into perspective would be to mention that that Moon's orbital path is 2,412,517.5 km (or 1,499,070 miles) [stackexchange.com] and that if it were orbiting the Earth at the same speed as this star, it would orbit every 11.5 minutes [google.com] (2,412,517.5 km / 12,600,000 km/hr), or 5 times an hour.

Now I want to spin up a fluid dynamical model to model the tides from that! I wonder what the hell that would look like? Guessing lots of oscillating tides with an occasional super-tide where some of the waves stack.

The Moon would be ripped apart by the stresses produced in accelerating it towards the Earth. Your model wouldn't last long - probbly only a short fraction of an orbit.

But why do you need a fluid dynamics model? Consider a rock (a "test particle") on the far side of the Moon, and the forces on it - it's gravitational attraction by the Moon ; ditto from the Earth ; it's inertia. Will the forces on the test particle push it into the Moon, or away from the Moon? Repeat for next particle, with a slightly small

Ok, I'll bite.Most of tax money spent by your government will never benefit you directly. By "most" i really mean ALL of it, except tiny, tiny fractions of a percent.This includes roads you'll never drive on, parks you'll never visit, government building you'll never step foot into, hospitals you'll never get treated at, employees you'll never need, etc., etc.

But getting back to the issue at hand, if you care looking at the linked documents from TFS, you'll see the contributors' universities:

Alternatively, it's just as valid to say that GP's entire tax contributions to date covered the cost of a few metres of road near his house, and that everywhere else he/she drives, visits, steps foot in, gets treated at, etc, are all paid for by someone else. Including this research.

It is the TOKEN act what matters. A dispute with Mexico over immigration is affecting research funding some way. It is not good when the mass will only understand RESEARCH BUDGET CUTS. Though it could be media that is not fully professional on this, and why am I making this comment in a thread for astrophysics?